GIVEBACK TO CIRCLE FOR JUSTICE INNOVATIONS
As we approach November’s elections, millions of voters are disenfranchised due to felony convictions, hindering or abolishing their right to vote. 36 states require identification at the polls, 7 of them maintaining strict photo ID laws. Early and mail-in voting are being curtailed and roadblocks are being erected toward voter registration and in-person ballots.
The restrictions on our right to vote are intended to succeed at impacting people of color, primarily. History tells us that, in the fifteen years after the Civil War, more than a third of U.S. states passed their first felony disenfranchisement laws. These laws safeguarded the practice of criminalizing the activities of formerly enslaved people, leasing them as free “convict labor,” and ultimately returning them to the conditions of enslavement. In order for such a system to remain in place, its victims had to be stripped of their right to vote.
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